Most small and medium sized companies face similar challenges in developing successful marketing and sales campaigns. These challenges include locating qualified prospects who are making immediate buying decisions. It is desirable to personalize marketing and sales information to match those prospects, and to deliver the marketing and sales information in a timely and compelling manner. Other challenges are to assess current customers to determine which customer profile produces the highest net revenue, then to use those profiles to maximize prospecting results. Further challenges are to monitor the sales cycle for opportunities and inefficiencies, and to relate those findings to net revenue numbers.
Today's corporations are experiencing exponential growth to the extent that the volume and variety of business information collected and accumulated is overwhelming. Further, this information is found in disparate locations and formats. Finally, even if the individual data bases and information sources are successfully tapped, the output and reports may be little more than spreadsheets, pie charts and bar charts that do not directly relate the exposed business intelligence to the companies' processes, expenses, and to its net revenues.
With the growth of the Internet, one trend in developing marketing and sales campaigns is to gather customer information by accessing Internet data sources. Internet data intelligence and data mining products face specific challenges. First, they tend to be designed for use by technicians, and are not flexible or intuitive in their operation; secondly, the technologies behind the various engines are changing rapidly to take advantage of advances in hardware and software; and finally, the results of their harvesting and mining are not typically related to a specific department goals and objectives.